Today, April 8, 2013, the brightest of Wall Street are meeting at the 10th Annual High Performance Computing Linux for Wall Street event in New York to learn about the latest technology innovations that give financial trading firms a competitive edge. With network latency achieving speeds of less than 50 nanoseconds, this year’s event focuses not only on speed but also on cutting-edge advances in network visibility, analytics and instrumentation. One way Cisco is helping traders gain a competitive edge in this area is by offloading the gathering of analytics data to the network devices, and working with industry leading monitoring firms like Corvil and TS-Associates to decode these new sources of data.

No doubt, high performance trading systems are becoming faster, processing more data than ever before. Network performance is of paramount importance in high performance trading markets where obtaining and acting on real-time equities, options and other financial market information, nanoseconds faster than competitors, may be worth millions of dollars. While complex trading analysis and risk mitigation still need to be performed outside the network layer, significant cost savings and scale advantages can be obtained by leveraging embedded intelligence in the network to enable key functions such as fabric congestion monitoring and intelligent traffic mirroring. Read More »

Financial markets today have become so dependent on well-designed technology architecture in support of growing automated trading business. I was recently part of a webinar centered on discovering how optimized latency performance, mitigation of microbursts, traffic filtering and analysis, and precise timing and synchronization are beneficial to all participants in the trading value chain.

The webinar was hosted by Wall Street & Technology, entitled, “Enabling High-Performance Trading Alpha: Beyond Low-Latency to Sustained Performance.” If you weren’t able to make it, register here to view a recording.

During the discussion, I was joined by some great minds in the financial services sector including Alex Tabb, Partner, TABB Group and Paul Jameson, Senior Director, Financial Services, Cisco. We discussed how high-performance trading fabric architecture and innovations like Cisco Algo Boost and the Cisco Nexus 3548 can help financial firms address challenges and capture opportunities in today’s financial markets. Here are a few key take-aways from the webinar I would like to highlight. Read More »

For the last decade I have been fortunate to work with leading buy-side, sell-side and execution venues from each major money center around the world. This has been especially rewarding as financial markets have become so dependent on well-designed technology architecture in support of the exponentially growing automated trading business.

As competition grows more intense with firms fighting to capture order flow and optimize liquidity, I have discovered a common set of business imperatives that resonate with most players in the space, including:

An ongoing requirement for ‘Being FASTER than the Competition’.

Increasing Order Flow and Liquidity to help grow revenues.

Ability to have greater risk management insight in the trading lifecycle due to Regulatory requirements such as 15c3-5.

Fast Market Data Delivery and Distribution to help Accelerate Price Discovery for participant firm and exchanges.

Lastly, capturing key opportunities during Volatility is vital to the business.

Financial Services is an important vertical for Cisco and we have been focusing our R&D investments to optimize the value and benefit we deliver to financial markets. This has resulted in the development of our High Performance Trading Fabric, a comprehensive architecture designed to optimize global electronic trading by addressing computing, routing, switching, optical, and trade flow intelligence in an integrated fashion that supports the multi-participant electronics trading lifecycle.

Our latest innovation results from the direct input my colleagues and I have received from our financial markets customers. This week we are announcing Cisco’s Algo Boost technology, integrated into our new Nexus 3548 switch platform. Algo Boost provides unprecedented performance, visibility and control for greater business agility and intelligence to allow firms to capture alpha across their trading operations.

I wanted to share a few benefit examples that are very relevant to the financial markets firms that I work with on a daily basis. Read More »

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